Handheld computing and communication devices such as smart phones have small screen sizes and small physical space relative to personal computers for positioning the key space. They are also used by the masses.
QWERTY keyboard was developed a century or more ago, in 1800s for use in Remington mechanical typewriters for two handed type writer operation that relied on all ten fingers including the thumb, where the thumb was used for pressing the long space bar at the bottom of the keyboard. See Prior art FIG. 1A
In the decades following the original Remington, many alternative keyboards came and went. Then, in 1932, with funds from the Carnegie Foundation, Professor August Dvorak, of Washington State University, set out to develop the ultimate typewriter keyboard once and for all.
Dvorak went beyond Blickensderfer in arranging his letters according to frequency. Dvorak's home row uses all five vowels and the five most common consonants: AOEUIDHTNS. With the vowels on one side and consonants on the other, a rough typing rhythm would be established as each hand would tend to alternate. See prior art FIG. 1B. FIG. 1C is prior art frequency of usage of alphabets.
With the Dvorak keyboard, a typist can type about 400 of the English language's most common words without ever leaving the home row. The comparable figure on QWERTY is 100. The home row letters on Dvorak do a total of 70% of the work. On QWERTY they do only 32%.
The Dvorak keyboard sounds very good. However, a keyboard need to do more than just “sound” good, and unfortunately, Dvorak has failed to prove itself superior to QWERTY. It appears that many of the studies used to test the effectiveness of Dvorak were flawed. Many were conducted by the good professor himself, creating a conflict of interest question, since he had a financial interest in the venture. A U.S. General Services Administration study of 1953 appears to have been more objective. It found that it really didn't matter what keyboard you used. Good typists type fast, bad typists don't.
It's not surprising, then, that Dvorak has failed to take hold. No one wants to take the time and trouble to learn a new keyboard, especially if it isn't convincingly superior to the old. A few computer programs and special-order daisy wheels are available to transform modern typewriters or word processors to the Dvorak keyboard, but the demand for these products is small. After all, expert typists can do nearly 100 words a minute with QWERTY. Word processors increase that speed significantly. The gains that Dvorak claims to offer aren't really needed.
The first computer terminals such as the Teletype were typewriters that could produce and be controlled by various computer codes. These used the QWERTY layouts, and added keys such as escape (ESC) which had special meanings to computers. Later keyboards added function keys and arrow keys. Since the standardization of PC-compatible computers and Windows after the 1980s, most full-sized computer keyboards have followed this standard. This layout has a separate numeric keypad for data entry at the right, 12 function keys across the top, and a cursor section to the right and center with keys for Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down with cursor arrows in an inverted-T shape.
The QWERTY keyboard was developed for typing while not looking at keys themselves. The same QWERTY keyboard has been used in the computers and has also been used for small devices in their very small key spaces relative to the computers. Small handheld devices are used differently. First they are used with a finger and are used for typing short texts for use in SMS and e-mail. They are not used for writing page level texts as are the QWERTY keyboard in computers.
The industry solutions have been to copy QWERTY design as best as possible in the limited space without understanding the different nature of these devices for data entry and different mode of key use in these devices.
The Nokia E55 uses a half QWERTY keyboard layout. A half QWERTY keyboard is a combination of an alpha-numeric keypad and a QWERTY keypad, designed for Mobile phones. In a half QWERTY keyboard, two characters share the same key, which reduces the number of keys and increases the surface area of each key, useful for mobile phones that have little space for keys. It means that ‘Q’ and ‘W’ will share the same key and the user has to press the key once to type ‘Q’ and two times to type ‘W’.
Also designed for mobile devices, the displaced QWERTY layout allows for the increase of button area by over 40% while keeping the same candy bar form factor. Entering, spacing and deleting are handled by gestures over the text area, reducing the keyboard's screen footprint. The layout is essentially a rearrangement of keys on the right half of the keyboard under those on the left and, as such, should present a gentler learning curve to touch typists. It was first seen on the iPhone application “LittlePad”.
FIGS. 2A-2B show small devices with QWERTY keypads illustrating the fact that the QWERTY has been universally adopted for small devices. However different key arrangements than QWERTY are required for small handheld computing and communication devices for efficient finger operation. Hence it is the objective of the embodiments herein to be able to provide different formats for positioning keys in the key space for small handheld electronic devices that it is believed would be more efficient for finger use in small devices. It is further the objective to provide for an improved key positioning for efficient and intuitive finger operation for data entry.